Sexual Boundary Violations, the Antigroup, and Training Organizations

Abstract

Sexual Boundary Violations, the Antigroup, and Training Organizations1 Nancy W. Kelly2 Over the past few years, the #MeToo movement has invigorated a larger societal conversation about the widespread abuse and sexual harassment of women, largely at the hands of men in powerful positions. Many women have joined this subgroup of people speaking out about sexual abuse by those in power, often finding their voices and their own "healthy aggression" through the outlet of social media. Yet I have noticed in myself—a feminist since my early twenties—an uncomfortable and abiding ambivalence about the #MeToo movement and the outcomes of the rare court cases that ensued. I believe that my ambivalence stems from both the nature of these denunciations as "public spectacles" and my apprehension that we are all missing something crucial at the center of this dynamic. Ultimately, I have come to understand my ambivalence as a measure of deep concern over our collective reluctance to address the notion of a group's or organization's contribution to the criminal behavior of powerful people. Neither Bill Cosby nor Harvey Weinstein acted in a vacuum; rather, each was embedded in an organization of men and women who saw, perhaps enabled, and ultimately kept quiet about repeated suspicions of abuse. In their silence, these organizations reinforced the notion that powerful men have certain perogatives around the performative nature of their sexual power, particularly with younger women. On a more personal level, however, I have also come to realize that my ambivalence about the #MeToo movement contains a deep core of grief and mourning within it, a gnawing grief that stems from my perception of the failures of the [End Page 13] mostly White feminists within my age cohort. Most assuredly, I include myself among those whose collective failure I now mourn. Though the #MeToo movement may invite us to celebrate the unfolding of a woman's "healthy aggression" on a personal level, it also underscores the failure to mobilize "healthy aggression" by thousands of others in the organizations that nurtured and shielded the abusers for decades. It is the necessity of mobilizing "healthy aggression" to confront these destructive, repetitive group dynamics that is the impetus behind this commentary. As both a group psychotherapist and a faculty member at a respected training organization, I want to begin by focusing on sexual misconduct and destructive group dynamics much closer to home. Over the past decade, the psychotherapeutic community has begun a more public reckoning with the widespread effects of sexual misconduct and boundary violations within our training institutions. Numerous clinicians—primarily former trainees and current faculty members at psychoanalytic training institutions—have stepped forward to write extensively about the impact of sexual misconduct on psychotherapy communities (Bornstein, 2004; Burka et al., 2019; Demos, 2017; Dimen, 2016; Fromberg, 2014; Gabbard, 1999; Gabbard et al., 2001; Harris, 2016; Honig & Barron, 2013; Jones, 2010; Levin, 2014; Sinsheimer, 2014). Most of these accounts reference the violation of ethical boundaries by the sexual involvement of a male faculty member with a female patient or trainee—that is, the violation of a relationship based on psychological care and vulnerability through the sexualization of the interaction. Taken as a whole, these accounts of sexual misconduct involving respected faculty members demonstrate that the therapeutic rupture caused by such behavior extends far beyond the specific dyad of analyst–patient or faculty–trainee, affecting the larger community of trainees, alumni, and faculty in profound ways. Rumors, innuendo, low-grade anxiety, and distrust are often reported in training communities where organizational ruptures have not been acknowledged and repaired within the larger group. Notably, the majority of these written accounts demonstrate the institution's inability or unwillingness to address this larger rupture, leaning on the secretive actions of ethics committees and institutional boards to contain knowledge of the violations to a privileged few. By and large, all these published accounts note that institutional reactions to revelations of sexual misconduct seem to conform to a common pattern involving secrecy, dissemblence, victim blaming, and avoidance (e.g., Anonymous, 2005; Aronson, 2017; Dimen, 2016; Gabbard, 2016; Levin, 2014; Slochower, 2017). Organizations faced with allegations of sexual misconduct by a faculty member often respond first by consulting...